Erik Antonson

Chase Kosterlitz, best known from his accolades in the SUP racing world has joined us on the Blue Zone SUP team and will be coaching in Costa Rica this year starting in November. Chase is also an incredible surfer and I’m pumped to have him on the team as his skillset in paddling, surfing and coaching will be a huge asset. His path to surfing is different from both Oscar, our other coach, and mine, in that Chase started as a racer and then moved into surfing four years ago. That’s the path that about 50% of our guests are taking and the strategic move to bring on Chase is to be able to communicate more effectively with our racing/touring clientele.

On this episode of the podcast we discuss how we met in the Bahamas this year at the JP dealer meeting, how flow has impacted our lives and how surfing is the highest form of flow we’ve yet discovered, and we get to know Chase and his athletic background.

Email us at erik@progressionproject.com to reserve your spot for the upcoming season, availability starts in late November and we’re running through April.

Hey there… Here’s a quick video breakdown from some footage sent in by Ryan. If you’re interested in having me break down some of your video send me an email or make a donation on my patreon page. And, if you like instruction like this, but want to get immediate feedback on great waves reserve your spot at Blue Zone SUP for this upcoming season.

Anders Ericsson is the author of Peak and the world’s leading expert on what it takes to become truly great at something. He’s studied masters in different fields and has discovered the common practices that separate the best from the rest. Our conversation covers deliberate practice, how to use mental representations, the skills that our kids should be learning, and why we grow to love things as we are becoming better.

The podcast with Anders goes hand-in-hand with episode 1 with Josh Waitzkin. Anders has done more research than anyone on mastery and understands the commonalities of the best. Josh has been at the tip of the spear in chess, Tai Chi push hands, and Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and in The Art of Learning explains in details his process of mastery.

In the conversation we reference my Paddlewoo Podcast with Kai Lenny. You can listen to that here.

The Importance of Quality in Mental Representation

Since our forced move to the states I’ve been finding flow where I can. One of those places is on the e-kart track. In Jacksonville we have an Autobahn Speedway that has e-karts which go insanely fast given the short track. The laps are electronically timed, and there is a screen after the timeline where you see your time on every lap. It’s the fasted deliberate practice loop I’ve found for a complex activity.

Driving is in my blood more than surfing. My dad raced cars, and I got my first go-kart at 10 years old. I love driving, and have found myself drawn to the track after a day of no surf or wind.

I’m getting better, times have dropped to within 1 second of the best track times, 18.4, but that last second is exponential. The closer you get the harder it is. Last week I plateaued at a 19.3.

The race gene is in both of my kids, and it’s a great family activity. We draw lines and strategize passes, then go test our ideas. On Monday my daughter and I decided to go early in hopes that we could drive together. Usually juniors and adults can’t, but if the track is empty they will allow it. We wanted to drive together so I could show her some new lines. The track was, and we shared an insane race and in following me she knocked a second off her best time.

It just so happened that Chris, the overall track leader, was there at the same time. He used to work at the speedway and now shows up early to drive before it gets crowded. I asked him if he would race with me and let me follow his lines. He agreed.

Driving is like anything else. At some point we didn’t know anything. We find what works for us and then get better at doing it and then we level off somewhere. The thing is, we rarely initially land on the best practice for a skill. So, our subsequent refinement is getting us better, but the foundation isn’t ideal. And no amount of practice will get us to the tip of the spear.

Following Chris blew my minid. His lines were completely counterintuitive to the way I approached the course. My goal had always been to shorten the track while smoothing out the corners, driving the shortest fast distance. But in two corners Chris lengthened the track, actually diving outside, staying wide and fast for an additional 8 feet and then diving in, carrying 4 or 5mph more through the turn. Trading speed for distance. These lines weren’t in my database for driving representations.

Chris let me follow him for 12 laps at a distance of 2 to 4 feet. It might be the most pure mental representation experience that I’ve ever felt. In those laps I was able to internalize his lines, how they felt, and can now run visualizations that I had never imagined.

So, the next time you’re hitting a plateau, maybe working harder isn’t the answer. Maybe it’s time to find a better model.

Erik Logan is a unique voice in the world of paddling. He’s achieved success on global scale, both in running SiriusXM and now the Oprah Winfrey Network. His love of paddle surfing started at the age of 42 when his wife gave him a wetsuit… I wonder if she had any clue where it would lead.

Erik makes time for the people and activities he cares about, and that extends beyond the water to helping his friends in career and business pursuits. His group of friends, Kalama, Laird, Dave Boehne, Brent Deal, to name a few, combined with his willingness to help and in some instances partner, has given Erik an insider’s, vested vantage point to our sport.

And it’s landed him on the board of USA Surfing, where he’s using his effectiveness and business acumen to help our sport grow. And we say thanks!

Below are some photos of the US Nationals that were held by USA Surfing in San Diego in June. Izzi Gomez and Emmy Merrill, and Sean Poynter and Giorgio Gomez will be representing the US for surfing in Denmark this year at the ISA World Games.

It was a beautiful morning. A handful of friends, up early, out on a fairly secret reef point in Costa Rica. Sets weren’t big, about chest high, but you don’t need big waves here to have an amazing time. The sum of the lineup was 4 surfers, 2 paddle surfers, my 8 year old son and I was riding Donna, my 6.9 single fin. All friends.

When it’s just us on the reef we find a rhythm of catching waves. Andrew always opts for the sneaker lefts. Alex sets up wide and takes the swing sets. I like the waves that bowl up right on the main boil which sets them up for the second shallow spot on the reef that I call Bob.

From the lineup you can see folks coming out from the beach about 15 minutes before they show up, it’s a long paddle. Normally you can tell who it is because only a few of us surf out there. Someone’s stoke is like a fingerprint, and when you coach paddle surfing you can recognize someone by their stroke a mile away. And this morning we saw a paddle surfer headed our way, but he wasn’t a local or anyone I knew.

I admit it, I’m a paddle surfing snob. I guess that’s what studying a sport for four years does for you. I can make assessments quickly about the level of a paddle surfer just by seeing them take a few strokes. I can gauge what V/W ratio they’re riding, if they have a race background, and more or less, their level of surfing.

As I watched this guy paddle out I could tell right away that he’d given zero thought to his stoke. You take anyone and put them on a board and hand them a paddle and there’s this stroke they do. It’s all in the arms, body is a tree, paddle enters the water at the feet at a negative angle and pulls a few feet behind them. Zero study. Zero work. Base level. I’ve begun calling it the bar-b-que stoke. Guy grabs the paddle board for the first time at a BBQ after a few beers and it’s the stoke he adopts. The stonger the guy, the worse the stoke.

I love paddle surfing as an art. And I love participants that study and train in the art. I don’t care what level anyone is on, as we all start at the beginning, but I do hold a prejudice against a certain type of paddle surfer, someone who gravitates to the sport because of it’s advantages, not it’s beauty, was probably a bad surfer and holds a grudge because time or ability has passed them by, only cares about wave count and not improving – this peice is about them.

The paddle surfer, we’ll call him John, made it to the lineup. He was riding a big board, close to 1.7 V/W ratio, and proceeded to paddle around the group and take off, straight away on the next wave. Too deep to make it. Normally, when you show up at a reef break it’s customary to sit on the side and let everyone catch a wave before you catch one, you say hi, wait your turn and then go. He BBQ’ed his way right to peak and took off. Then, John paddled back to the channel, around the lineup, this time setting up about 20 meters in front of everyone, and took the next wave.

This continued for 30 minutes. I have the video, which I won’t release, but what I didn’t realize while out there was that he wasn’t even making the waves he was hoarding. What’s the point? You’re paddling deep just to catch waves you can’t even ride just to hold off other surfers.

Finally after a while, I said something. At this point, I, and everyone else in the water was beyond pissed, and as the local paddle surfer it was my place to step in. Maybe I could have been more diplomatic. I think I said something like, “Buddy, we’re just going to go when we want from now on, you’re taking every wave.”

His response is what got me. He said, “you’re catching the same amount of waves that I am.” Which is hilarious, because literally, in the previous 20 or 30 minutes he’d caught 2 times the waves of the rest of the lineup combined. But this shows that in his distorted view of reality, he wasn’t even doing anything wrong. Completely oblivious.

Ok, that’s all preamble for the points I’m about to make.

As Colin McPhillips says, “An asshole in the water is an asshole in the water no matter what kind of board they’re riding.” While this holds true, the advantage of a paddle board can exponentially increase the power of said asshole. That’s why surfers hate us. And, in that moment, I hated us.

If you read my blog you don’t fall into this category, but there is a group of paddle surfers who don’t care about progression, helping grow the sport in the right way, or integrating the sport with surfing. This group likes to paddle surf because they want to catch more waves. F@#$ technique. F@#$ the race to the bottom. Give me a huge f’in board and get out of my way. My surfing days have past me, so I’m going to ruin yours and take everything I want. There’s not many of these guys, but they do exist, and they are our enemy.

It only takes one guy like this to turn every surfer he ever meets against paddle surfing. At the beginning, paddle surfing was a part of surfing. In One California Day, Joel Tudor is riding a standup. The Malloys were early adapters. Machado…. My guess is that one day they found themselves surfing with a guy like this on a standup and saw a scary possible future and then said, this could change a lot. And decided not to grow the sport. I definitely had that thought in that moment.

Think about the damage one guy like this, with that obtuse attitude, can do to paddle surfing. And the thing is, because he’s on a paddle board, and because it’s a different tribe than surfing, he gets grouped in with me and you. Within our own tribe we can differentiate. An asshole who’s on a shortboard is “Tom” the a-hole, an individual. But to surfers, the a-hole on the paddle board is the tribe of paddle surfers, the group of us. And that label, that feeling, sticks.

Done at its highest level paddle surfing is a high form of surfing, arguably the most technically challenging. Just paddling a negative float board is an art from. But at it’s base, lowest level, it has the power to be the ugliest form of surfing. It gives tools to those who choose to take advantage.

It’s our choice how we grow this sport and what behavior we tolerate from our own, and ultimately, which version of paddle surfing we want the world to know. Let’s make sure we have a hand in promoting the right one.